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Even when great cities were attacked and seized, the defence was not stubborn and desperate except in the unusual case that a surrounding army cut of… - Anthony Reid
" "Even when great cities were attacked and seized, the defence was not stubborn and desperate except in the unusual case that a surrounding army cut off all means of retreat. The Dutch general Coen was told that "the Pangeran of Banten fears no Portuguese, Spanish, Hollanders, or Englishmen, but only the [King of] Mataram. From the latter, he says, no one can flee, but for the others the whole mountains are sufficient for us; they cannot follow us there with their ships." The river ports of eastern Sumatra, Malaya, or Borneo often shifted far inland in response to a seaborne attack. When an English party went to buy pepper at the once flourishing town of Inderagiri in Sumatra, they spent two days looking in vain for some trace of where it had been and then learned that the whole population had moved three days' journey up the river in response to an Acehnese invasion six years earlier.
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About Anthony Reid
Anthony Reid (19 June 1939 – 8 June 2025) was a New Zealand-born historian of Southeast Asia.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
A.J.S. Reid
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Anthony John Stanhope Reid
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Tony Reid
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Additional quotes by Anthony Reid
The Makassarese of Sulawesi were reputed in the sixteenth century to be resisting Islam because pork was their major meat source. According to the local chronicle of Bulo-bulo in the Sindjai region, when this district was invited to accept Islam in the seventeenth century by the ruler of Makassar under the veiled threat of war if it refused, one prominent chief defiantly declared that he would not bow to Islam even if the rivers flowed with blood, as long as there were pigs to eat in the forests of Bulo-bulo. Miraculously, the story goes, all the pigs disappeared that very night; so the chief and all his men were obliged to convert.
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In densely settled wet-rice areas much of the loss of population was caused by destruction of food crops-either as a tactic of war or as a result of the passage of thousands of troops. In Sultan Agung's campaigns in 1620-25 against the coastal regions of East Java and Madura, eighty thousand troops besieged Surabaya and its nearby towns off and on for five years, devastating all the rice crops and even poisoning and damming up the river water of the city. The Dagh-Register recorded that after these campaigns "in Surabaya not more than 500 of its 50 to 60,000 people were left, the rest having died or gone away because of misery and famine" . Even on the side of Mataram there must have been enormously heavy losses, not only from the famine and disease that beset the unsuccessful besiegers of Batavia in 1628-29, but also from "the lack of men, so that they had not been able to bring the water to the rice fields" during the wars against Madura in 1624, with the result that the major rice-growing areas of Mataram itself were barren.
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